Driver Logging Levels - UG1739

For the AMD Solarflare net driver, two settings affect the verbosity of log messages appearing in dmesg output and /var/log/messages:

• The kernel console log level.
• The netif message per network log level.

The kernel console log level controls the overall log message verbosity. You can set it with the command dmesg -n or through the /proc/sys/kernel/printk file:

echo 6 > /proc/sys/kernel/printk

Refer to ‘man 2 syslog’ for log levels and Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt for a description of the values in /proc/sys/kernel/printk.

The netif message level provides additional logging control for a specified interface. These message levels are documented in Documentation/networking/netif-msg.txt. A message only appears on the terminal console if both the kernel console log level and netif message level requirements are met.

You can view the current netif message level with the following command:

ethtool <iface> | grep -A 1 'message level:'
        Current message level: 0x000020f7 (8439)
                               drv probe link ifdown ifup rx_err tx_err hw

You can change the netif message level with ethtool, either by name:

ethtool -s <iface> msglvl rx_status on

or by bit mask:

ethtool -s <iface> msglvl 0x7fff

You can configure the initial setting of the netif msg level for all interfaces with the debug parameter for the sfc module. For example:

modprobe sfc debug=0x7fff
ethtool <iface> | grep -A 1 'message level:'
        Current message level: 0x00007fff (32767)
                               drv probe link timer ifdown ifup rx_err tx_err tx_queued intr tx_done rx_status pktdata hw wol